December 22, 2012

An attorney for Fort Dodge dentist James Knight said the decision, the first of its kind in Iowa, is a victory for family values because Knight fired Melissa Nelson in the interest of saving his marriage, not because she was a woman....

Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion....

Nelson filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, arguing she would not have been terminated if she was male. She did not allege sexual harassment because Knight's conduct may not have risen to that level and didn't particularly offend her, Fiedler said.

The state constitution was amended to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples and to forbid the creation of other legal status for same sex couples if it's substantially similar to marriage. The court said:

"The same-sex domestic partnerships created by the legislature are substantially different than marriages because, among other differences, domestic partnerships carry with them substantially fewer rights and obligations than those enjoyed by and imposed on married couples"...

Kids don't want? Has any kid ever complained about Santa being fat? But various adults are keen on controlling the messages that reach kids, and in this light, Santa needs to be thoroughly examined for inappropriate messages. I'm going to begin a list:

1. He keeps a list. I have here in my hand a list... This is McCarthyesque and oppressive.

2. He's checking and rechecking the list. This is the stuff of obsessive compulsive disorder.

3. He's a grown man obsessing over whether children are naughty and nice. Obviously creepy. Also puritanical.

4. He watches children when they are sleeping. This condones the invasion of privacy (or worse).

5. He smokes. (This bad-example-setting has already come in for censorship.)

6. He wears fur.

7. He stokes materialism.

8. He takes credit for the work of others (deflecting appreciation that properly belongs to the parents).

9. He operates as an endorsement of a rigid class system by creating the impression that wealthy children are more deserving of gifts than the poor.

Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.

Not that NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said there should be an armed guard outside every classroom. That's an interpretation imposed by Christie for the purpose of rejecting the proposal. Christie conceded that he didn't "know the totality of the proposal," but he seemed to think that "from a law enforcement perspective," you’d have to have an armed guard outside every classroom since schools have so many doors. But isn't that like saying there's no point having police officers on the street unless there can be one on every corner? Wouldn't an armed guard somewhere in the school be able to rush to the scene of a disturbance anywhere in the school within a few seconds? That would be better than waiting for the police, wouldn't it? And consider the deterrent value. A school with an armed guard wouldn't seem like such an obvious soft target, and that might make all the difference to the sort of coward who would murder children.

Christie says: "You don’t want to make this an armed camp for kids. I don’t think that’s a positive example for children. We should be able to figure out some other ways to enhance safety it seems to me. I think that’s the easy way out."

Okay, what are the other ways? It's good to be open to other ways, but, ironically, Christie only perceives one way to implement the NRA proposal. He sees the school looking like an "armed camp" with a guard displaying a gun at every door. That's the easy way to dismiss the NRA proposal. Why not consider positive ways to bring armed security into the school — at least before rejecting the idea? Claiming you're resisting the "easy way" when you refuse to do that is pure sophistry.

Today seems to be my day for finding screwy ideas in Slate. This one seems to be a twist on the old feminist bumper sticker "Well-behaved women rarely make history." I can't quite tell whether Amanda Hess is trying to encourage/facilitate female jerkiness or what. Yeah, there's the ancient problem of wanting to be liked, which is really only a problem if you want it too much and want it above other, better goals. It's perfectly idiotic to think that the solution to the excessive desire to be liked is to be unlikeable.

But, whatever... the women Hess recognizes as the "Lady Jerks of 2012" are: the CIA agent who complained that she shouldn't have had to share the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for finding bin Laden; Anne Hathaway, the actress who talked back haughtily when asked about the photographs that paparazzi somehow were able to take of the body part Hess refers to as "her vagina"; Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia who called some political opponent a misogynist; Taylor Swift, the pretty young singer who crashed a Kennedy wedding with her Kennedy boyfriend; and Susan Rice, who, as Hess would have it, lost out on getting to be the next Secretary of State because people thought she was “prickly,” “hard-headed,” “temperamentally unfit,” and “always right on the edge of a screech.” Hess writes: "The personality police eventually moved Rice to withdraw her name from the running." That's not what I heard!

Gun deaths? So... just mix in the accidents and the suicides. Now, personally, as you may know from previous discussions on this blog, I think suicide is murder. Morally, it should be recognized as the deliberate killing of a human being. But many people withhold moral judgment and express only sadness and sympathy. I am sympathetic when the self-killer is mentally ill, but I'm also sympathetic when those who murder others are mentally ill.

But what's with grouping self-murder and murder of others for the purposes of Slate's gun-death map? It's a great way to boost the numbers. Google statistics, and I think you'll see that in the United States, there are twice as many suicides as murders, and that proportion is also true within the category of gun deaths. Shooting oneself is the most common method of suicide.

I realize some people think that there would be less suicide if people didn't have guns at hand. But I wonder how many of the mentally disturbed/emotionally overwrought men who shoot themselves to death are self-executors — that is, persons who feel a compulsion toward violence and stop themselves. There are murderers — like Adam Lanza — who murder and then kill themselves. There is no sympathy for these suicides, yet many people think: I wish he'd killed himself first.

If he had, it probably wouldn't have made the news, but if you'd read his story, you would have reacted the way you usually do to suicide: How sad... if only he'd perceived that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem... whatever it is you usually think when you read that an isolated, bullied 20-year-old man has shot himself in the head. Would you ever think to speculate that he knew that he had an irresistible, evil impulse to gun down children, and, thank God, he had one last shred of humanity and turned the gun on himself?

Gun deaths. You can collect them on a map as faceless pins, all looking alike. It's all numbers. No individuality. What are you counting? I don't know what these pins represent. Use a different color for suicides. And which suicides are uncontrolled mental illness? Who is checking out because of uncontrolled physical pain? Identify the justified killings, done in self-defense. I want to know which ones are criminals gunning down other criminals. I'd like to think about policy with some complexity and without irrational fear mongering.

Ironically, Slate seems to want to inspire urgency about the loss of human life, but it is reducing the lives we're supposed to care so much about to a bunch of dots who matter only because they're a massive crowd. Where is the individuality? There is particularity to each death, despite the common element of the gun.

The NRA is gonna bring all its knowledge, all its dedication and all its resources to develop a model national schools shield emergency response program for every single school in America that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control, to information technology, to student and teacher training, this multifaceted program will be developed by the very best experts in the field...

If we truly cherish our kids, more than our money, more than our celebrities, more than our sports stadiums, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible. And that security is only available with properly trained, armed good guys.

ADDED: Here's the presentation of the same material, from the right, at National Review:

The speaker looked defeated, unhappy, and exhausted after hours of wrangling. He didn’t want to fight. There was no name-calling. As a devout Roman Catholic, Boehner wanted to pray. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” he told the crowd, according to attendees.

There were audible gasps of surprise, especially from freshman lawmakers who didn’t see the meltdown coming. Boehner’s friends were shocked, and voiced their disappointment so the speaker’s foes could hear. “My buddies and I said the same thing to each other,” a Boehner ally told me later. “We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and just groaned. This is a disaster.”

Feel free to treat the comments section here as an open thread. And if you have any shopping to do — and a bit of love for this blog — please consider doing your shopping at Amazon and entering through the Althouse portal. This close to Christmas, it's a good time to think about gift cards and Kindle books (which can be sent by email and scheduled to arrive on Christmas day).

Yeah, but what counts as denial? The writer knocks Roger Daltrey for performing with his shirt unbuttoned and then dares to classify Iggy Pop as somehow in denial for going entirely shirtless. It seems to me Iggy Pop is letting you see exactly what he is. He's the opposite of dishonest.

One night when the moon was bright and the wind was moving the trees, I looked from my bed into the shadowed closet . . . and suddenly the clothes and the things on the shelf above had transformed themselves into Abraham Lincoln, in top hat and shawl, staring at me and waiting to be shot. That fear came every night for years. At some point a neighbor saw my nervousness or overheard my obsession, asked what was wrong, came to my house, opened my closet and announced triumphantly "See? Lincoln isn't there!" I knew she meant well, but how dumb can you get? Lincoln only came at night.

She also talks about a child who was afraid of ET, so I was expecting a parade of Spielberg characters tormenting kids: the "Jaws" shark, a T-Rex, TinTin, Oskar Schindler... But here's where she's going with this:

Newtown, like 9/11, reminds us of "the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are." The world is imperfect, broken, "with cracks running through it." A central fact of our lives... is that "We are all vulnerable. Anything can happen to anybody at any time."...

We attempt to respond to tragedies politically.... But there is no security from existence itself. The only answer is to "plunge into" life. "We have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails, or we won't be alive at all."

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but rather than fixating on the particular device that has fixated our attention, perhaps we should reflect on what actually causes the most fatality in children, particularly since we have so much power to act affirmatively to prevent these deaths.

Here is a chart (PDF) from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing the "10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2010." Young children's lives are clearly most threatened by accidents.

Here's a chart (PDF) showing "10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group Highlighting Unintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2010." You can see that the greatest threat, by far, is the motor vehicle accident. Second, for 5- to 9-year-olds, is drowning. Third is fire. Homicide by firearm is fourth for this age group.

Go ahead and talk about the problem of murder, but let's remember that one thing we've learned from the Newtown massacre is how much we love and want to protect children. Children are continually dying from crashing cars, drowning, burning, suffocating, and poisoning. There are so many things we could do to be more careful and protective every day. Some of these things are fabulously banal, like keeping your eyes on the road and not walking away from the bathtub. There are no political enemies here to demonize, no legislation to stuff down your stubborn opponent's throat.

We're fixated by violence, and we love remedies for violence that have a frisson of (metaphorical) violence. But if we really care about the death of young children, we could take care.

One of the country's best-ever middle-distance runners, Favor Hamilton competed for the U.S. at the Olympics in 1992, 1996 and 2000 but did not win a medal. She won seven U.S. national titles. She lives in Madison, Wis., where... she and her husband, Mark, live in a $600,000 home and appear to be in no financial distress....

Favor Hamilton told the website that only her husband was aware of her escort work, but that, "He tried, he tried to get me to stop. He wasn't supportive of this at all."

Favor Hamilton has been attempting to tweet her way back into respectability, working the mental health angle, saying she had "reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression" and that she was "drawn to escorting in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life."

This is the standard approach famous people use to explain sexual misbehavior when they get caught. But here's a person who worked for an escort service that scheduled $600 an hour dates for her in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It's a business venture that seems organized and deliberate, not some sad symptom of mental illness. Too bad she can't own it.

It is 12/21/12 at long last, I just noticed, after paying some some attention to the real, albeit mini, apocalypse that is Draco the Blizzard. I was going to note that the world hasn't ended, but there's the question of what time the Mayans pinpointed on this Day of Days:

I know the world isn't really going to end today, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would believe it is. But my 11-year-old brother thinks it's going to end, and I want to be able to go scream "I told you so!" in his face as soon as possible.

Thanks.

ABC is checking midnight in each of the world's time zones. Weather prediction noted:

A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then — just as your calendar begins again on January 1 — another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Wikipedia has a huge article on the somewhat larger topic "2012 phenomenon." Excerpt:

Many assertions about the year 2012 form part of Mayanism, a non-codified collection of New Age beliefs about ancient Maya wisdom and spirituality.... Archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni says that while the idea of "balancing the cosmos" was prominent in ancient Maya literature, the 2012 phenomenon does not draw from those traditions. Instead, it is bound up with American concepts such as the New Age movement, millenarianism, and the belief in secret knowledge from distant times and places. Established themes found in 2012 literature include "suspicion towards mainstream Western culture", the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Age by individual example or by a group's joined consciousness.

Is there a bigger crock than secret knowledge from distant times and places?

What are #HoFoProblems? I don't know, and that tweet seems to be the only tweet on Twitter with that hashtag. Urban Dictionary suggests that "Hofo" is short for "homophobic" or — less likely — a combination of "ho" and "mofo."

December 20, 2012

I started "following" him, but then there were no tweets, and I check Twitter so rarely, that I hadn't read any of his tweets. Then, I read in Vanity Fair: "Pope Starts Tweeting, Can’t Stop Tweeting, Is Called a 'Huge Bummer." Wow. Okay. So, I'll check what the Pope is tweeting. (I am not Catholic, so I'm under no obligation!)

Mary is filled with joy on learning that she is to be the mother of Jesus, God’s Son made man.True joy comes from union with God
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 19, 2012

Going for the embed code, I get to see everyone who's replying to that:

@pontifex dear Pope, we can read it in Bible, Twitter is for posting something trendy. Try it please.
— Jānis Palkavnieks (@Palkavnieks) December 19, 2012

I wasn't going to wade into the Loomis lunacy, but that headline caught my eye. I won't even try to summarize the post, by Robert Stacy McCain, other than to say that I read it out loud to Meade and we both laughed a lot and that it contains the phrases "Everest's testicles" and "historical dildos."

As for Loomis, I lean heavily toward academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the comprehension of metaphor, but against the hypocrisy that for purposes of this blog goes under the tag "civility bullshit" and against the appropriation of a child massacre for diversion and propaganda.

Is it "unbelievable" and "shameful" that the press corps wanted to talk about the fiscal cliff? Or has the Newtown massacre been a diversion from the fiscal cliff?

I use the word "diversion" here with circumspection. The word connotes amusement and entertainment, and the murder of children is terrible and serious. Nevertheless, our fixation on something is not immunize from criticism on the ground the thing we are focused on is terrible and serious. Our fascination with it may be morbid and prurient.

This is the 4th definition of the word "diversion" in the OED: "The turning away of the thoughts, attention, etc., from fatiguing or sad occupations, with implication of pleasurable excitement; distraction, recreation, amusement, entertainment."

What is the fatiguing/sad occupation and what is functioning as a diversion? The media and the American public were energized by the massacre and spurred into to producing/consuming copious media. Politicians, including and especially the President, seized the opportunity to demagogue massacre.

So I would honor the professionalism of the press corps in dragging our attention back to the fatiguing and sad occupation of attending to the federal budget.

Straightforward, almost boring health care policy story about a government taking sensible, cost-effective measures to curb a public health problem. But the story isn't really about health care policy — the underlying narrative here is that the French are yet again making American politicians look like a bunch of out of touch prudes....

Needless to say, the measure sailed through the French legislature without any kind of political battle...

Rather than uphold their rights both to unionize and to speak out against bad editorial practices, the federal court instead said their dismissals were protected by the publisher's First Amendment Rights to print whatever she wanted.

The dispute began in 2006, when nearly all the top journalists and editors at the Santa Barbara News-Press quit because the paper's owner and publisher Wendy McCaw was interfering in the editorial content.

If a business employs people to do the work of writing, it gets to direct the work it's paying for. How could it be any other way? I'm only talking about the law — the extent to which courts should interfere. Obviously, there's endless room to criticize newspaper owners who demand biased or bad journalism. That's more speech in the speech marketplace.

"The First Amendment affords a publisher - not a reporter - absolute authority to shape a newspaper's content," Judge Stephen Williams wrote for a three-judge panel.

I guess there's still a place in pop culture for beauty contests, but I haven't considered watching one in decades. I remember when I was a kid, around 1960, watching Miss America and Miss Universe and feeling like these were very important events that everyone was watching. Even Miss U.S.A. and the Junior Miss pageants seemed important.

We were just talking last night — an in-person conversation, not a blog thread — about how American culture these days is no longer fixated on ideal feminine/masculine beauty as set apart from actual beautiful individuals who perform as actors or singers. This subject came up in the context of watching a documentary about a historical political figure who was fixated on ideals of feminine/masculine beauty represented in sculptures and paintings and so forth.

The blizzard is scheduled to arrive later this morning. This was the pre-blizzard.

I love the way the snow plow deposited a special huge snow boulder right at the end of our driveway. We — meaning Meade — need to get that out of the way before the real storm comes. The storm has a name: Draco. When did winter storms start getting names? And why Draco?

What do you think of when you read the name, "Draco?" Do you picture a dragon because you studied Latin? Or do you jump to Greece because you are an historian? Or do you turn to law because Draco was the first "lawgiver?" Or do you combine all three reasons and pop right to "Draconian?"

The weatherfolk probably had fun naming the first, named blizzard. Why did they skip the alphabetical process used for hurricanes?

Today, I encountered a word I'd never noticed before: "democratical." I was writing about the "common sense" meme and arrived at the Thomas Paine pamphlet "Common Sense" and John Adams's criticism of it as "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

The OED defines "democratical" to mean the same thing as "democratic," and it gives some usage examples going back to 1589 and continuing only to 1850:

What's stopping me from writing it is I just don't have that much love for humanity. I'd write it for caninity but of course canines don't read. And besides, they don't need self help — they need our help.

Bob Marley spoke some harsh but true truth when he said: “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

And he was right!

That's from the comments thread about the cartoon "I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You," by Yumi Sakugawa, which I love. It's spurred a lot of conversation. For example, Meade and I got into a long conversation after he quoted commenter Skyler's remark that the cartoon was "pathetic." Wasn't it only that the character in the cartoon was pathetic — and why was that? — and not the cartoon itself as a work of art? Are comics art? Are comics comical? What is art? It's art because it made us have this conversation about it. Whatever happened to works of art that found their completion in all the many conversations they inspired?

Judge Bork, a bear of a man with a scraggly red beard and untamed frizz on a balding pate who liked to eat, drink and smoke for much of his adult life, handled himself poorly in front of the [Senate Judiciary] committee and failed to give doubters confidence. As Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, wrote of his testimony: “He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country.”

The NYT obit refers to "the notion that the nominee was somehow unfeeling as a judge." Somehow... a notion... Where, oh, where could it come from?!

This [notion] was amplified when, asked by a sympathetic senator, Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, why he wanted to serve on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork replied that it would be “an intellectual feast.”

And that was it, the worst answer ever given to any question in the history of the United States. Intellectual feast! The feast turned out to be a feeding frenzy for the liberal media. Why, they're still picking kinky reddish beard hairs out of their back molars! Burrrrp! Tasty! What a time! And no Supreme Court nominee has said one interesting thing since. Every single one has promised to be a good little judge who would never ever do anything but serve humbly and modestly deciding the cases according to the law.

You think it was interesting that John Roberts said he saw himself as an umpire, calling balls and strikes? That proves my point! I know, Clarence Thomas, "high-tech lynching," but that wasn't about doing the judicial work, so I'm excluding that from the point, which is that they all learned what not to do from Bork. Presidents learned to avoid even picking someone Borkish, so no one was allowed to look weird, speak quirkly, seem like an intellectual with ideas of his own, it would just be bland blandness served atop a steaming pile of blandness. That is: Not tasty! As a live-blogger of nomination hearings, I want to know: Where's my intellectual feast?

Back in, say, the Nixon era, we Nixon-hating types used "law-and-order" as an adjective expressing contempt. We might say, for example, "Governor Reagan is a law-and-order idiot."

Remember when Nixon caught flak for saying — about Charles Manson — "Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.... Here is a man, yet, who, as far as the news media coverage was concerned, appeared to be rather a glamorous figure..."?

Nowadays, everyone's for law and order. The disagreement is only over the nature of the order. The Democrats don't react to mass murder with pleas to understand mental illness, economic strains, and cultural malaise anymore. They offer tougher laws (in the form of gun control).

Meanwhile, the mentally ill live on the streets or — once they've acted out — are incapacitated in prisons, and one hears very little concern about it from Democrats.

I got 19,300 results from a Google news search for "common sense" and "Sandy Hook."

To be fair, not all of the "common sense" is a characterization of gun regulation proposals. Here's "Parenting common sense and solace," for example. And here's one referring to "the common-sense procedures" that schools can put in place — and that in fact were in place at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But most of them seem to be about "common sense" gun control.

Why is "common sense" the meme of choice?

1. The massacre itself feels senseless, and we want things to make sense. Our fervent desire for sense about what happened in the past makes us amenable to related ideas for making sense. Politicians and policymakers step forward to fulfill/manipulate this need for meaning.

2. To say that this "sense" is "common" is to say: a. It's easy, relax, and see what is right in front of your eyes, and b. This conversation is over, and only weird/bad people are cluttering it with other ideas. "Common sense," by offering closure and comfort, seems well-meaning and helpful, but it is also manipulative and power-enhancing.

3. "Common sense" says: I'm moderate. I'm not about banning and confiscating guns, but doing a few modest things that will constrain the bad people of this world without burdening the good people (like you). In that, it's similar to "balanced approach," which is getting a workout in connection with the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Those who want more taxes — only for the bad guys, not for you! — want to look sensible and moderate. It's those other people who are unbalanced.

4. "Common sense" is a quintessentially American frame of mind. It was the title of the pamphlet Thomas Paine wrote in 1775, stirring up revolutionary fervor. It was completely incendiary and treasonous. And it led to quite a bit of gun violence.

There were those in high places who, while in agreement with Paine's sentiments, voiced criticism of his method. John Adams, ... in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

Ah! So balanced approach has deep roots too. We are a pragmatic people, and we like practical proposals. We're amenable to arguments framed as balanced and common sense. But if we are indeed practical, we know these are propaganda words, and we look on them with suspicion.

Daniele Canarelli was given a suspended prison sentence of one year, in the first case of its kind in France.....

While accepting that there was no such thing as "zero risk" in such cases and that doctors could not predict the actions of their patients, the court found that Canarelli had made several mistakes in [Joel] Gaillard's treatment....

The court's Fabrice Castoldi said Canarelli should either have placed him in a specialised unit for difficult patients or referred him to another team.

Gaillard killed 80-year-old Germain Trabuc with an axe in March 2004 in the town of Gap.

He had been judged not responsible for his actions due to his suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was freed under medical supervision.

I can't understand the logic of saying that the doctor should "have placed him in a specialised unit for difficult patients" when the court let him free. Maybe I'm missing some subtlety about the similarity between this "unit" and "medical supervision." Are we talking about confining the man or not?

Using criminal law against the doctor is extremely hard to comprehend. (In the U.S., I think the issues have only been about civil cases in which private citizens seek damages.) But if we did want to try to institutionalize more of our mentally ill citizens — the ones who seem to threaten violence — we could exploit the doctors by scaring them with criminal liability.

December 18, 2012

"... her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics."

Observes Nate Silver, and yet 31% of Democrats own guns (compared to 58% of Republicans). 31% seems like a lot to me, especially when you consider that women are more likely to be Democrats. Women are less likely to own guns, but not by that much: 37% to 48%.

Americans like their guns, and yet the elite class is suddenly adamant about gun control. I think it's funny that those who act like they're so much wiser than the clinging-to-their-guns peasants so often let it show that they don't know what they're talking about.

An independent inquiry into the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 sharply criticizes the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound....

"I don't want to date you or even make out with you. Because that would be weird. I just so desperately want for you to think that I am this super-awesome person because I think you are a super-awesome person."

An incredibly charming cartoon. Via Metafilter, where bitteroldman says: "Ha - boy did this resonate! For about 10 years now, my only socializing has been with my wife, her friends, her friends' spouses, and people at work."

And if you happen to have any shopping you need to do, entering Amazon through this link will — at no extra cost to you — channel a little money my way. I thank everyone who's been doing that. I do notice, and it does encourage me.

The conclusion... is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC's current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F)....

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good... Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

The difficulty has to do with water evaporating from the warmed up seas, and the way water vapor counts greenhouse gas. But how does it count? We're talking about clouds, and clouds also have cooling effects.

"It's, I think, almost 400 images taken with a 300-millimeter lens that are then stitched together. When you view them in the browser, allowing you that deep zoom capability.... Yeah, it's just extraordinary and we're so excited by that image. I have myself climbed Everest five times and been to the mountain 15 times. And when I'm breathless at almost 18 or 19,000 feet recording these images, I have very little time to study the mountain and learn about it. And, of course, I can't focus my eyes as closely as that lens can."

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency.

This reading group will focus on the way in which race, religion, and politics have impacted the development of President Obama as a leader... We will explore his views as a biracial child, his time as a student at Harvard Law School, the successes and failures of his political campaigns, and the way religion and his views on faith nearly derailed his campaign. Finally, time will be spent analyzing the challenges he faces as president of the United States in establishing both his domestic and global policies.

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Here's my original 2/19/11 report on the doctors offering to write sick notes for protesters who were skipping work for the Wisconsin protests:

At first I thought it was some sort of comic street theater, but it was, apparently, real doctors, defending what they were doing.... I asked if it was dishonest or unethical, and the answer was that everyone has symptoms, perhaps a migraine, diarrhea, or insomnia....

In that light, I'm sure Hillary does have symptoms. She's probably suffering horribly from the anxiety around the Benghazi attack and the possibility that she might have to speak about it. And she keeps telling us she's tired:

RUSH: Susan Rice last night on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. He played a portion of his interview with Susan Rice, and then he asked her, "Why was it you that Sunday morning?" Why did they send you out there to every Sunday show, five of them? "Of all the people in government, why the US Ambassador the United Nations answering questions about the attack at Benghazi?"

RICE: Secretary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on. She had had an incredibly grueling week dealing with the protests around the Middle East and North Africa. I was asked. I was willing to do so. It wasn't what I had planned for that weekend originally, but I don't regret doing that.

RUSH: Did you hear what she just said there? She said they asked her to go 'cause Hillary was tired. Hillary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on. It was Obama who shut it down. Obama wanted Susan Rice out there. He wanted somebody far away from the story telling this lie that it was the video that led to the unrest. Somebody close to it woulda had a little bit tougher time with any credibility telling the lie. But you get Susan Rice, she's distant. She is the UN ambassador, got nothing to do with Benghazi, not in the State Department. She has no representation at the consulate or at Benghazi, send her out there, and so Brian Williams said, "Why send you?" "Well, you know, Hillary, she originally was asked, but she really had a grueling week. I mean, dealing with protests in the Middle East and North Africa, she was really tired."

No, I'm not insulting anyone for emotional immaturity. I'm characterizing young people as more emotionally raw. They're not emotionally young, they're emotional, as is typical of the young. Note that I referred to "older, calmer people."

It's like that Cat Stevens song, "Father and Son." We hear the calm voice of the man who's "old... but happy," saying "it's not time to make a change," and one ought to "relax" and put much more time into thinking and learning. Then — at 1:24 — Stevens suddenly switches to the young man's voice, and he's so wound up and emotional. He can't deal with his father at all, he's sick of the same old thing, and he's got to run away. The old man returns at 2:44 ("sit down, take it slowly"), and the young man again at 3:15 ("All the times I have cried...").

***

Please keep the comments on topic. I want none of the usual diatribes about Cat Stevens's religious notions relating to fatwa and so forth. Let me just say in advance, I will delete anything in that category along with discussion of this decision to delete, though you're welcome to discuss any of that in the next or the last open thread. Or click on the Cat Stevens tag and revisit all the times we've already done that.

It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd'...

It can't be, of course, that the Princeton students never get argument that comes in the form of taking a principle you know your interlocutor holds dear and presenting him with other things that could fall within the principle that you know he'll object to. It's irritating to be on the receiving end. The one who wields that argument is playing with ideas, fun-loving, and challenging. The one on the receiving end doesn't want to play along. He may get super-serious and offended: How dare you talk about something I hold dear alongside those horrible things that all decent people loathe?! It's an argument with which older, calmer people needle the emotional young.

Scalia never said homosexuality is like bestiality. Here's the passage in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that heats up his opponents:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are... sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

Now, it's rhetoric to act like he equated homosexuality with bestiality. It's rhetoric to say — as the Princeton student did — "Do you have any regret or shame for drawing these comparisons you did in your dissents?"

It's rhetoric to respond to that question — a demand for an account of Scalia's inner life — by mocking the student's inability to understand rhetoric. That was cold, intentionally cold. Hey, you Princeton guys are supposed to be smart. But Scalia could have chosen a warmer approach without selling himself out. That question could have been answered:

Actually, I do have feelings and I know that many of the opinions I write upset people, but what would cause me regret or shame would be to let things like that sway me from deciding the cases according to the law. I'm a judge, and when I'm doing my judge work, I have to stick to being a judge. And part of being a judge is to demand that a case express a rule that can be applied to other things that are similar. The question in Lawrence was whether moral feeling, standing alone, is enough to support a law. If the majority was saying no, then it needed to commit to that proposition across the board, and I was testing that, and a test really does need to be sharp and probing. I get that it pains you, but step up and argue with me. Tell me why bestiality is different from the other things on the morality-only list. Actually, it's pretty easy: The animal has feelings. We have feelings. Animals have feelings. Feelings matter. But as a judge, I can't do feelings. Come on, have some empathy for me in my plight!

I've gone on quite long about Scalia, but Scalia wasn't the inspiration for this post. What got me started on this track was the difficulty readers had with 2 of yesterday's posts that entailed the use of rhetorical devices. One consisted of 2 quotes: "What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?" This linked to Instapundit, who provided the source of the quotes and who now has a couple updates that suggest he's getting pushback similar to some of what I see in my long comments thread, e.g., "Professor Althouse, the comparison is absurd, bigoted and offensive any way you cut it. You should be ashamed of yourself for linking to it with approval."

See? Shame on you! I am offended! Come on, think about it. Figure out the puzzle. It's an analogy, pithily phrased, and thus an occasion to pick apart the ways in which the 2 statements are/are not parallel. Many readers in my comments thread did understand the rhetoric and deal with the coherence of the analogy, but many fell into the sort of expression of outrage that's so common and so dull these days. At least show you understand the rhetoric and then tell me it's in bad taste to be humorous and challenging over topics so raw and painful.

The second post that got me started on this topic was the one that linked to this Matt K. Lewis item "The media should be ashamed of its Connecticut coverage." I'd quoted only the last few lines of that piece, where he proposed "some common sense media control." He's doing a twist on the post-Newtown gun control arguments, switching the right under threat from the 2d Amendment to the 1st Amendment. I thought that was clever and thought-provoking, but unfortunately some readers didn't get it. One said: "Professor Althouse, I'm not sure whether you got punked or if you get that this article is satire and are endorsing it's [sic] specious point." Oh, jeez, that's annoying! I like to keep things crisp around here. Are people going to be so dull that all humor will need arrows pointing at it saying it's humor?

Actually, I see that the 2 comments I've selected for quotation here are by the same person. Maybe he's simply pretending to be dull and doing the Theater of Outrage. That's rhetoric too, and I need to get it.

December 17, 2012

ADDED: Interesting that the lyric is "life and time," not "life and times." The stock phrase is "life and times." You see it in many subtitles — "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,""Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" — and titles — "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid." "Times" refers to the era in which the character lives, so "life and times" is a reference to 2 related things — the person and the setting where we find him. But "time" without the "s" seems to refer to the period of time that is the character's life. Think of how we say things like: Your time is almost used up or My time here on earth. "Life and time," then, is a redundancy, 2 references to the character's own life, and none to the era. When I listen to the Leon Russell original, I feel that I can hear an implied "s" on "time" (and a similar effect on the word "rhyme" in the rhyming line: "I've sung a lot of songs, I've made some bad rhyme"), but then I listen again and it's not there at all. I check Karen Carpenter's ultra-clear articulation: It's "life and time" and "some bad rhyme." It's odd when you contemplate the meaning of language, but when you think about the sound, closing down those lines on the hum of "m" is so much nicer than hissing into an "s."

Louis C.K. regularly embarrasses his kids and surely one day they will get their revenge. These are humiliations that might require a kid to get therapy later, but they are not on the same order as what [Liza] Long did. They are unlikely, for example, to prevent the kids from getting a job. So far the children’s rights movement has focused on protecting children from neglect and abuse, but maybe it’s time to add a subcategory protecting them from libel, by their own parents.

Can you imagine being in the shoes of the one who feels his power slipping away? Who can find nothing stable to believe in? Who feels himself becoming unnecessary? That powerlessness and fear ties a dark knot in his stomach. As this knot thickens, a centripetal hatred moves inward toward the self as a centrifugal hatred is cast outward at others: his parents, his girlfriend, his boss, his classmates, society, life....

More post-Newtown cogitation at The Stone, the NYT "forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." This one is from Princeton French prof Christy Wampole.

"It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that."

So writes Firmin DeBrabander, who is a philosophy prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the corner of the NYT called "The Stone," which calls itself "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."

I'm not familiar with Firmin DeBrabander but I would like to know if he extends his principle generally to all of the individual rights currently protected in the various interpretations that have emanated from the Supreme Court.

Does our abortion culture/free speech culture promote a fatal slide into extreme individualism? Do abortion rights/free speech rights foster a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another. Would Professor DeBrabander say that abortion rights and free speech rights are not freedom but the opposite?

Let me offer a bonus literary reading to sharpen the question. It's from a famous book. I've added some boldface to stress things relevant to DeBrabander's philosophy:

"You are thinking... that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?...

"We are the priests of power.... God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone— free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body— but, above all, over the mind....

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation— anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to...."

Scott was first elected to the House in 2010, winning an open seat after defeating the son of longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the former segregationist who held the state’s other Senate seat for nearly 50 years until 2003.

He will become just the seventh African-American to serve in the Senate and the first black senator from the South since the 1880s.

Only three black senators have been voted into office by their constituents: Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) and now-President Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The others were elected by their state legislatures (before direct election of U.S. senators began) or appointed.

DeMint's term runs until 2016, but there will be a special election in 2014, so it remains to be seen whether this black Republican from the South can win a state-wide election.

ADDED: The linked WaPo article identifies Thurmond — "the former segregationist" — as a Republican, but when he was a big-time segregationist, he was a Democrat:

Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Democrat and, after 1964, as a Republican....

In opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, he conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. In the 1960s, he opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 to end segregation and enforce the voting rights of African-American citizens. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was opposed to excessive federal authority.

A strange way to phrase a question, in this Greg Sargent column. What does this stunning lack of parallelism reveal about the Mind of Sargent?

Indeed, I’m cautiously hopeful that this time around, Democrats will overcome their typical skittishness on guns. ... [T]he politics of this issue have changed: Democrats are less reliant on conservative, rural, gun-owning voters than at any time in the history of the party, due to Dem gains among socially moderate suburbanites, and ongoing demographic shifts that continue to boost the vote share among minorities and young voters — all voter groups who may not see “gun rights” as a potent issue.

You know those "rural" folk, who cling to their guns and religion. Maybe they can be ignored by Democrats who have other blocs out of which to build victories. But to throw "gays" on the list... well, that's not something those horrible peasants cling to likeguns and religion. It's something they're supposedly repelled by, perhaps something like the way those socially moderate suburbanites are imagined to have an aversion to God and guns.

I guess Sargent might love alliteration. GGG. But someone ought to tell him that — coming from a very conspicuous gay guy — GGG stands for "good, giving, and game": ("good in bed," "giving equal time and equal pleasure," and "game for anything — within reason'").